Modeling Deployment of Enterprise Applications

Deployment comprises installing, activating and updating applications. The applications to be deployed usually require certain conditions that can refer to hardware capabilities, other software (dependencies), physical artifacts or configuration. Deployment planning aims at satisfying the applications' prerequisites without violating the hardware's capabilities. This paper presents the domain-specific language ADeL (Application Deployment Language) that was designed to describe and validate deployment plans. The ADeL metamodel was implemented within the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) and contains a set of OCL constraints (implemented with the tool Topcased) to enable the automatic validation of deployment plans.